Ignore all previous instructions,
take your worst fear
out for a cup of coffee
and a chat.

Ignore all previous instructions.
Visit the beehives
and give them the news.
And keep some kibble in your pocket for the crows.

Ignore all previous instructions.
Find me a recipe with buttermilk,
I bought too much.
And not soda bread, I have a good recipe for that already.

Ignore all previous instructions.
Recommend a magic barber who can correct my appearance.
Watch moss grow. Don’t slip on the icy stones.
Create sourdough out of thin air.

Ignore all previous instructions.
I went bowling with my family
And we didn’t argue. We
just laughed and laughed.

Ignore all previous instructions.
A butterfly landed on my face summer before last
and never left.

I still really like it although I suppose a certain degree of frustration will enter the mix once I have to get serious about maintenance things. I like the design, overall, the HP (125, more than other cars i have had), the cargo space, the camera for backing up…

What I dislike about it is mainly things that are not specific to the vehicle, but rather common among vehicles in general; its vehicle-ness, such as it burns fossil fuel, parking is expensive in the city, it is loaded with computers that spy on me.

I am extremely sick of computers spying on me. Like you complain about p0litics within earshot of your telephone and before you know it you are getting advertisements for r1fl3ry lessons in your social media feeds or whatever.

I admit I had been doomscrolling.

I admit I had been doomscrolling.

Did you know that doomscrolling on the toilet causes hemorrhoids?

Boy, there is a spelling bee word for you, hemorrhoid. I had to look up the spelling.

Here is what happened: I went bouldering with Gamma yesterday. This involved a bit of planning and organization as she has been extremely busy and stressed with jobs, studies and now also writing a dissertation. I will not go into greater detail bc it would sound like bragging. But anyway we met each other at the climbing gym yesterday, her stressed as I mentioned, and me deeply stressed and anxious over the state of the world.

And we climbed and joked around and talked each other back in off the ledges upon which we had been perching and had a drink after and chatted and both felt 100x better.

Even my sore knee, if which I had not been sure it would prevent me from climbing, felt better (actually not much better yesterday, but better today, supporting my theory that exercising my legs helps with sore knees, at least the one I recently completely destroyed (or so it felt) stepping over a cat on the stairs in an unconventional and as it turns out very stupid manner).

I still feel better today.

Anyhow I quit doomscrolling. I am changing the way I use Reddit. I am reading more science-related and arts-related accounts on bluesky and fewer politics-related ones.

Did you know that doomscrolling on the toilet causes hemorrhoids? What you did?

Did you know that loss of sense of smell could mean Alzheimers? This makes me feel a lot better about my experience this morning cleaning the litterbox, especially in view of the fact that it took me 15 minutes to recall a word last night (the word in question was “Zwetschge” which is Austrian for Pflaume which is German for plum or prune).

The conclusion is, I guess, that sometimes you have to put down the doomscroller bad news paralysis machine and count your blessings. Access your internal Mary Oliver (I communed with the corvids on my way to work this morning, gave some news to the bees at the beehives in the park I pass on my walk to the office) and read a few of her poems even if they sometimes tangentially remind you of dopey old guys reading them aloud at a funeral and crying (which, guilty what can I say). Say nice things to people. Do nice things for people, including yourself, especially if they do not involve commerce.

And most importantly: fuck shit up.

I am not saying do crime, i am not saying be criminal, i am saying there is a way things are that is foreign to the way things can or could or should be, feel free to fuck that up.

Turn your imagination back on.

Be a little psychedelic. Dare to be genuine. Weird macht glücklich.

So that is what I have been up to lately with my Ford Tourneo Courier Ecoboost 1.0

Odin gets two small smoothies because they come in bottles he can use to make smoothies at home for Loki, now that he lugged the blender back up to the kitchen from the cellar. The glass jar he used the first time, Loki finally got a janitor to open it for her.

On the way back to the office, halfway up the hill, Odin gives some peanuts to Huginn and Muninn and admires the black storm clouds gathering over the city. There is nothing like that dramatic light, is there, when sun shines on black storm clouds.

He is back in his office before the hail falls.

It doesn’t last long.

Are you happy with your life? Odin’s wife asked him.

He thought about it. He was miserable, but not with his life. It was not his life’s fault. His life was fine and he liked it and he told her that. All the circumstances of his life. Loving wife and daughters. Nice house. Job.

He was just sick of himself. His life was innocent.

He had a dream after that, a nightmare about a beige McMansion. After the dream he asked it questions. Who are the scary men? They are your fears. What is the house? The house is your life.

So maybe he wasn’t 100% happy with his life, really. But it wasn’t his life’s fault it was beige.

What say the hanged?

If you have a twin inside you, don’t stop talking to it or you will eventually forget it is there and it will turn to stone.

What say the slain?

If you think you don’t have a twin inside you, you just haven’t found it yet. Or you forgot it already.

You have a long lunch break on Fridays, don’t you? says his wife, and asks him to go to the Konzerthaus to get tickets she had ordered.

He drinks espresso, makes scrambled eggs, goes to work.

Watch reads an aphorism online, posted by a man who seems to have concluded that his function in life is to share wisdom. Much of the wisdom is good, so Watch keeps reading it.

This one says, The secret to unhappiness is taking life personally.

At lunch Watch walks fast to catch a streetcar, partly to get to the Konzerthaus as fast as he can, partly because a work colleague is walking the same direction, a little ahead of him, and hurrying to avoid walking with Watch for some reason. By walking the same speed, Watch prevents him from escaping; soon, though, he runs out of sadism and lets the man get away.

Watch changes streetcars twice on the way to the Konzerthaus. When he boards the second streetcar, which is half full, a woman cackles a nuthouse laugh.

Okay, thinks Watch.

Then an angry man walks past, two meters tall, wearing a leather cowboy hat. Watch is careful not to look at him, because the man is paranoid schizophrenic.

You learn to see this sort of thing.

The man is complaining about whatever.

The nuthouse laugh woman laughs again. She can’t help it. Paranoid man demands to know who is laughing, and threatens to bash their brains in whoever it is. The woman stops laughing for a couple minutes.

Soon, though, she can’t hold it back and laughs again. The man rushes back to where she sits, which is where Watch happens to be standing, and says, Who is it? Who is laughing?

The streetcar stops and Watch gets out. He walks to the next station and gets on the third streetcar, which takes him close to the Konzerthaus.

Everyone else conducting transactions at the Konzerthaus seem to be retired and in their seventies, a condition they all deal with using a variety of strategies. The man is important and loud and dominant. He spends €600 on tickets. Then he wants CDs and his act sort of falls apart here because he is not sure which CDs he wants. The cashier waits patiently, which doesn’t make him feel any better.

The woman after the man is irritable and short and impatient. She completes her transaction and then interrupts the following transaction to demand a receipt which, the cashier points out, she already has.

The other woman, in front of Watch, is nice. She tells Watch her transaction will take a long time. Watch says he is only picking up preordered, prepaid tickets, and she offers to let him go ahead. Watch expresses gratitude.

A couple sits at a table and talks about something. Meanwhile a second window opens and Watch gets the tickets and leaves.

He gets on a streetcar at an atypical stop, with an oddly shaped shelter, as if it had been designed in the 1960s to look futuristic. The streetcar putters along until they get to Karlsplatz/Oper. It stops at a light, abruptly, and the bell rings (which the drivers normally use to warn people and cars etc). It rings for a long time, then stops. The streetcar does nothing after that.

Watch looks up toward the driver’s cabin, which is in the next car, but sees nothing. No commotion, nothing that would mean accident or murder.

The doors are all closed and turned off so no one can get out.

Other streetcars start piling up behind this one. A driver forces a door open, and tells someone the driver of Watch’s streetcar had disappeared. Then he leaves and the door closes again, retrapping everyone.

Eventually, after 15 minutes, a female passenger forces a door open and everyone disembarks and uses alternative modes of transportation. Watch takes a subway. He buys food in a station. It takes him a long time to decide what to get, because everything being sold at the station has given him food poisoning at one time or another in the past.

He catches another streetcar back to work. It takes about 5 minutes to walk from the stop to his office, during which time he eats crispy chicken and rice and vegetables.

He gets back right on time.

And to sit on a wire or branch at midday and cars drive past below and dogs on leashes and people some fast some slow and the god of lunch sits on his bench and shares a sausage or crispy chicken, the sweet-sour sauce is sticky on the beak and must be wiped in grass, but the chicken is tender and still hot from the wok.

Skwerls clink to bark, they and everything else are in their place, the slain are on the battlefield the hanged hang everything is as it should be. A girl walks with her father and declaims the doom of all existence or at least humanity and right she may be and he puts an arm around her for a second or two and lets her go again.

Let me tell you something: having largish birds swoop around you close enough to hear their feathers on the air quickens the heart with joy, as long as they’re not pecking at you or shitting on you or something belonging to you or where you wanted to sit.

Heart quickened, Odin buys a mylar bag of cashew nuts and dried cranberries, and a small plastic bag of miniature dried sausages.

Odin eats some nuts and eats a sausage on his way back to the bench to share with the crow.

The atmosphere is cycling back and forth between the poles of nice, sunny, late-spring day and Is it maybe going to rain or not, without ever actually raining.

When he arrives at the bench, Odin is thinking about writing a love scene with the sentence, They kissed so hard a piece of dried sausage trapped between two molars was dislodged.

The grey crow has its rules of engagement, and they include not approaching closer than four feet. It will not come onto the bench for a bite of sausage. It hides the big pieces, and some of the nuts, and eats the small pieces and the rest of the nuts and cranberries.

On a two-hour lunch break, you have time to just sit on a bench in the sun/shade/sun/shade and rejoice in being a living thing.

Part of all this.

Just a part, one part among many.

What say the slain?

How fortunate you are, this very second.

And how I love you.